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ON COMING OUT

Shortly before my 19th birthday, I came to my
parents. It happened midway through my first year of college. I told them, I am
not interested in playing any sort of conventional role in society and have no
foreseeable need for a college degree. Up till now I have been the model
student, brother and son, done everything you or those in authority have asked
of me, and now I’d like to live my life as I see fit. And so I’m dropping out
of school.

My argument was, if you really don’t feel interested in
doing something, should you force yourself to do it? Sure, all my life I had
done what I didn’t want to do. Doesn’t every kid? It’s what we call homework.
But now I didn’t have to be a student if I didn’t want to. Shouldn’t enthusiasm
be a driving and directing force in life, and because I had no enthusiasm for my
studies, I shouldn’t force myself to attend school.

So I stopped attending class for a week before my mother
convinced me to return to school. Please, she said, we’ve never had a college
graduate in the family, and you’ve always been such a good student. So I went
back. The following year, also in winter, I flirted with the notion of dropping
out again. This time it lasted 3 days before I was back in class, again at my
mother’s behest. By way of enticement, we struck a deal. I could quit my job
waiting tables and my parents would assume my car payments and provide me with spending
money. All I had to do was focus on school. This worked for a time. I took more
classes, and my grades improved. But when the following winter came around,
again I saw no use for a higher education, and so I went so far as to withdraw
from the quarter. At last, I was a free man. But I had nothing to do. And it
didn’t feel right to do nothing in a household where everyone else was either at
work (my parents) or in class (my brothers). So when spring came around I was
once again enrolled, this time resolving to complete my degree. I started
drinking coffee. This stimulant made it much easier to take courses I wasn’t
interested and memorize facts I could otherwise do without. And the following
spring I graduated with a major in history.

I use the phrase “coming out,” rather than dropping out, because
while both expressions have a negative connotation (at least until the present
century), what I experienced was akin to what my younger brother went through
at around the same time. How to tell our parents that he was physically
attracted to men? And when? Or should he try to live up to their expectations
for him and deny his feelings in favor of solitude, or satisfy them behind
closed doors, or perhaps have a wife just for show - a la J. Edgar Hoover, if
you believe the film? In the end he chose to be who he was, though he had a
little help from circumstances I won’t get into.

After graduating college I went to the job board at UCLA and
browsed positions available to history majors. That space of the peg board was
blank. So I got a job at a restaurant. Which didn’t even require a high school
degree. I had vague aspirations to apply to business school, but family issues (death
and divorce) led me to redirect my course and become an aspiring writer
instead. Credit cards let me prolong to this dream, which eventually led to
bankruptcy. I tried my hand at settling down again with a serious girlfriend,
working for a time as a high school teacher. Finally, a job that required a
college degree. A job I found stultifying and draining. Just like the degree
that led to it. Tired of feeling disenchanted and stuck in traffic, I went back
to school, this time to become a medical doctor. Med school doesn’t require a
college degree, only 2 years worth of credits. I did a year of residency before
I decided the practice of medicine was a business and it wasn’t for me. Twenty
years after doing it the first time, I had come full circle and came out, or
dropped out again. Why buy into society if you don’t agree with where it’s
headed. Rather than work a job you despise to have a life you don’t want with
someone you don’t get along with, just go it alone and reduce your wants.
Always my motto. So I lived it. And I’m not alone. Most work too much, and find
what they do either boring or downright despicable. So why do it? Nothing
better to do and because they have to. To pay for stuff we don’t need.

In a recent poll, 80% of people in industrialized countries
agreed with the statement “I could happily live without most of the things I
own.” Conspicuous consumption did not work out. Where did it get us anyway? To
global warming, overpopulation and pollution. To living on top of each other.
More than half the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and the UN
estimates that by 2050 it will be 66%.

Paramahansa Yogananda said it best, in his little gem of a
book “The Science of Religion.” Money is necessary as a means to fulfill basic
needs (food, shelter, water), but so little of it suffices, beyond which it is
superfluous if not harmful. When money becomes an end in itself, to be hoarded
or for the sake of the status and possessions that come with it, it becomes a
false idol, and the moneymaker a slave in its service.

Despite a swelling population, there is more than enough of
everything to go around. One website tells us: “World
agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30
years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide
everyone in the world with at least 2,720 calories per person per day.”

If we all were true to our natures and lived a simpler life,
we could all do what we found most fulfilling, even if that means simply to be.

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